Sublimation(5)

None of that would be endearing. Everything you wanted to know about her was too personal. You wanted to crack open her chest and dissect her heart. You wanted to ride her neurons. You wanted to fit inside her skin. Sometimes the size of your want scares you.

You could just ask: “Do you want to reintegrate?”

Except, no. That’s too much. That’s too fast. You know you have an ungirlish tendency to speak without thinking (see: asking Yujin about murder, asking your fiancé out first instead of waiting to be asked, and asking people how old they are, constantly). You’ve tried to learn restraint. Better instead to say nothing.

You watch your instance order. She’s just close enough that you can hear her speak. Slightly accented, her voice a little lower than yours. How did that happen? You’re similar, but not the same. The barista doesn’t give her a second glance, doesn’t gesture to the English language menu or anything. For a moment, it’s like she lives here.

You want to look through her stuff. She brought a backpack and a small silver suitcase. No purse. Very practical. You want to carefully peel back the zipper and peer inside the black mouth of the backpack, you want to carefully slip your hand inside and feel the contours of the items inside. The smooth glassine of a pair of sunglasses. The rough leather of a bound journal. Crinkled gum wrappers with chewed gum inside.

Instead, you open your own bag and take the MERGEBREAK band out and place it on the table. The MERGEBREAK, placed in the middle of the table, neatly serves as both invitation and question, a reassurance that you both are aligned on not reintegrating. And then you can save the rest of the conversation until a more appropriate time. Better not to spring it on her sleep-deprived and plane-drunk. This is her first time back in Korea. You can’t imagine returning to Korea. You’ve never really had to return anywhere. You feel a sudden stab of sympathy for her. You rest your chin on your hand and think about alternate universes while watching her shift from foot to foot, rolling her shoulders the same way you do when you’re nervous.

Your phone buzzes. You scroll through your messages. Tae (the only person you have vibrations on for), asking how the meeting was going, asking if your day was going well. Minsoo asking if you were still doing dinner, and how did Rose look? Your mother, asking if Rose had gotten fat in America. The girls, talking about the trip you were going to take to Tokyo next summer, with copious use of stickers. Yujin, asking how coffee was going, followed by three memes and a couple of emojis.

You respond to Tae: It’s good we’re getting coffee!! Still on for dinner with M, if Rose wants to.

You respond to Minsoo: Still on for dinner as long as Rose agrees.

You respond to Yujin: IDK how you talk to YJ all the time this is so weird!!

You ignore the girls and your mother.

Then you snap a photo of Rose—it’s a bad photo, blurry, her hand in motion as she reaches for the coffee, her head nothing more than a black smudge—and send it to everyone.



* * *



When your instance returns with your coffees, she picks up the black MERGEBREAK like it’s a life jacket and she’s adrift in the Pacific Ocean. This makes you feel very bad. Almost angry.

“My life isn’t so awful,” you want to say. “My life is very good, actually. I’m usually very happy. This week is a terrible outlier. But you don’t seem like you’re usually very happy. Which is interesting, because you don’t even seem like you regret leaving, or feel bad about Harabeoji dying.”

And then you would continue and say: “Sorry, this is a really awful first introduction. Maybe we should set some ground rules about this. But Harabeoji told me that we should reintegrate. Right before he died. How do you feel about that? Do you want to? I want to know what he was thinking.”

But saying that wouldn’t be a very good way to make her like you. So you just watch her strap the cuff on, the perfect complement to your own, with the glossy MERGEBREAK over her wrist.



* * *



You didn’t mean it about the emotional murder. You try not to be morbid. But there was this game that you used to play with Minsoo, when you were kids and just learned about the Aztecs, which was called human sacrifice. You would pile up the couch cushions into an altar and one of you would lie down and try not to giggle and the other would say lots of stuff about the human sacrifice and say, “Stop laughing!” and then you’d use Minsoo’s toy lightsaber to poke the sacrifice in the chest. And then the sacrifice would have to make lots of terrible noises. Obviously, your mothers would try and stop you from playing this every single time, so it became your favorite game for three months when you were seven.

When you tried to play it with Yujin, he agreed at first, because he wanted to use the lightsaber, but when you made him be the sacrifice he started wailing. It was, in retrospect, very funny. But at the time it was very serious and very annoying. You had yelled at him. You hadn’t understood how he didn’t get it: The getting-to-play-with-the-lightsaber was the exchange for the being dead part. To get to play with the lightsaber, with its beautiful fwoosh-fwoosh sound effects and pretty battery-powered glow, you had to lie around being bored and not laughing or whatever.

Reintegration conceptually feels the same as playing sacrifice. So that’s why you’re thinking about murder. It’s an old memory from before you instanced. Your instance must also remember it, unless your childhood games have been subsumed under the rest of your lives, like a layer of sediment that has been buried under new loam.